Hmmm … the last quote “It is impossible to live up to the expectations of a post-Dirac world” is exactly the *opposite* of a Dirac quote that the UC’s Valentine Telegdi was fond of: “A Golden Era is a time when ordinary people can make extraordinary contributions” (BibTeX appended, naturally). So let’s take that as “Dirac’s opposite Great Truth”.

Nowadays, every student learns that quantum mechanics can be framed (in Feynman’s phrase) “(from a) very large number of different physical viewpoints and widely different mathematical formulations that are all equivalent to one another.” And so everybody understands that the future of QM research is very largely contingent upon what framework(s) we choose to work in.

But it is less often appreciated that the *past* of quantum mechanics is similarly contingent. And isn’t thinking creatively about the past, instead of the future, hugely advantageous? Because surely, we can ask-and-answer questions about the past of QM with considerably greater insight than we can ask-and-answer questions about the future.

So let’s ask ourselves this question about the past of QM (and thank-you, Dave and Richard, for stimulating it!): what past-paths for the development of QM, might have led us to a present that more closely approximates a Dirac Golden Era?

Now, I am writing this off the top of my head … but this question is for me so interesting (in the sense of naturally uniting my interests in QM, math, medicine, and resources) that I am *NOT* going to finish the post.

Instead I am going to map out a “Dirac Golden Era” world in which (provisionally): (1) Kähler lived before Hilbert, (2) Kolmogorov and Arnol’d lived before Heisenberg and Schrödinger, (3) Berezin lived before Dirac, and (4) von Neumann, Wiener, and Feynman pursued their interests in biology and microscopy, instead of working upon nuclear weapons and missiles.

For reasons that I will work-out off-line, it seems to me resulting world might more nearly have approximated a Dirac Golden Era, than our present (soberingly) dystopian planet, in which too many young researchers are struggling to establish family-supporting careers … and into which soberingly many (10^9) Dave Bacon Jrs. will be born in this coming 21st century.

I seem to dimly recall a short-short (Rudy Rucker?) SF road-trip story, featuring Richard Feynman and John von Neumann, that developed a similar line of thought … and I would be very grateful to any Pontiff reader for a pointer to that story.

The post-modern point of the above meditation is simply this … if we seriously want to change our planet’s future … then perhaps it is imprudent to believe that we cannot alter our planet’s past … because at the very least, we can thoughtfully choose the narrative(s) that we tell ourselves about that past.